I love it that you and the many people you surround yourself with are brilliant web developers - and your site has a 90's almost craigslist asthetic.
But like craigslist, it's a very ironic cool and minimalist design that I hope you don't change.
But like craigslist, it's a very ironic cool and minimalist design that I hope you don't change.
Looking at it with firebug, the whole nav is one tall .gif and all the links are mapped via rectangular coordinates. The title for each essay is also a .gif, though they have alt description tags.
I know its your baby, but if you managed this with wordpress or another CMS, it would be really easy and you could be much more flexible to add new things. With wordpress, you could make a theme just like your current, but with CSS styled text links and you would just make static pages for all your new essays and whatnot. I could recreate your whole site in about an hour if you'd like.